January 10, 2025
Perspective
Early in my career as an academic, I was asked to oversee a project to create a multimedia teaching resource for teaching worship. It led me to learn how to use a video recorder to provide helpful video for students to explore and assess real life worship practices. One of the first things I learned is when you add a camera to a ritual, you are deciding for the viewer what is important by what you record. With this in mind, we decided to provide multiple perspectives that you could switch between on the fly, allowing the viewer to decide what was important. Think about it. If you sat in our service in the choir loft, it would look different than if you sat in the center section facing the choir loft. Neither perspective is “right” nor “better.” Both are “true,” even as they are different. That is why we offer those who watch our services online multiple camera perspectives—though only one at a time—as it gives them a bit more of a “you are there” perspective.
I mention all this because we are shifting from Christmas to Epiphany. In the first weeks of this transition there is a good deal of narrative overlap, while there is a significant difference in perspective. Both Christmas and Epiphany underline the mystery of the incarnation, God enfleshed in the person of Jesus. Christmas is mostly the perspective of Luke, who used the stories of Elizabeth, Zechariah, John the Baptizer, Simeon, Anna, and of course, Mary, Joseph, and their infant son to introduce the messiah. The camera is zoomed in on the lives of a few people, and aside from a handful of shepherds, there was little public acknowledgment about what was transpiring in this rather ordinary, if not sad, birth of a poor couple’s first child.
Not so with Mathew and John. For Matthew, the news of this birth was international. It was from Persia (modern day Iran)—home of the first Messiah or Christ, the Persian King Cyrus—that astrologers identified a star proclaiming the birth of a Jewish King. About two years, later they arrived in Jerusalem asking where the new king could be found. King Herod was disturbed by this news, so he did some research and learned that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. He then sent these astrologists to Bethlehem under the guise of wanting to honor the new king himself, when he actually wanted to kill him. The Persian delegation went to Bethlehem where they found the young family in their home. But then they took the back roads home, avoiding reporting the news to Herod; leaving Herod to declare that all boys two and under in and around Bethlehem should be killed.
This story is told with a wide lens, the scope is not just broad but grand. News of the birth of God’s Christ was no secret. And it was consequential for many, near and far. Similarly, when Jesus was baptized by John, there was a public declaration of Jesus being God’s son and the Lamb of God who would remove the sins of the entire world. Jesus was also not secretive when he turned water into wine at a marriage feast in Cana. Epiphany means revelation or proclamation. The texts of Epiphany are like the spotlights that pan the sky on the night of a movie premier leading you to the theatre for its festivities.
All these stories are equally part of the gospel, but they show the beginning of Jesus’s life and ministry from very different but complementary perspectives. One of the values of the discipline of following the church year and its lectionary is that it forces us all to deal with the entire gospel in all its diversity, which, when put together gives us a more fully formed understanding of both the life of Jesus as recorded in the gospels, as well as a deeper and richer understanding of the Good News of redemption and new life in Christ, which is simultaneously intimate and global.
May God bless our celebration of God’s revelation of Jesus as Christ to the world in the days ahead.
~ Pastor Todd